SSI1 167 | Anthropology, Culture, and Difference

In this first-year seminar, students will deeply engage and explore the ethnographic canon -- the total body of work assembled by anthropologists over the past century that seeks to describe the many different and diverse ways of being in this world that humans have configured. Students will commence with the journals and records of the travelers, writers, and thinkers that predated the formation of the discipline of anthropology. Students will then begin to read original ethnographies -- a set of assigned texts that includes several disciplinary classics. Students will ponder and discuss the enduring issues that have long puzzled anthropologists, and will simultaneously assess the critiques sometimes levied against the sustained engagement with cultural otherness that anthropologists pursue. While the geographical scope of this class is global in nature, course readings will partly emphasize the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest. In addition to meeting the SSI1 Core requirement, this seminar will provide an ideal entry point for any career trajectory concerned with understanding and engaging with diversity in our modern world, and any career trajectory that will grapple with cultural difference on a global scale.